Intel's most recent desktop roadmap has a new chipset edition, Bearlake. Bearlake is the next generation family of Northbridges, designed to replace the Q965, P965 and G965 Broadwater chipset family. Intel has no chipset on its roadmap to replace i975X.

Like the upcoming 965 family slated for release this July, Bearlake will come in three flavors: "Q," "P" and "G." "Q" will be the stable mid-to-low end series, "P" will be the mid-to-high end series and "G" will be the integrated graphics core.

Intel's roadmap claims Bearlake will support a 1333MHz front side bus, and all current and future Core processors. Intel's roadmaps made similar claims that the 915, 925, 945, 955 and 975 chipsets would support all Netburst processors when those chipsets were announced. Conroe, although not a Netburst-based CPU, does not work for these chipsets without a different VRM.

Bearlake will also ship with an updated ICH Southbridge, ICH 9. The estimated ship date for Bearlake is about a year from now. Intel isn't talking specifics yet about the new chipset, though at the recent Intel Developer Forum, Intel had talked about the Snowgrass platform -- NAND for the motherboard. The mobile version of Snowgrass, dubbed Crestline, is slated to appear in notebooks about the same time as the Bearlake launch, so it would seem probable to expect Bearlake to use such technology.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

965 never said its out, just that all boards based on it will support Conroe. :)
865, well there is one Asrock board that claims to support Conroe.
975 was released start of 2006, same time as the Pentium Extreme Edition 955.